First, let’s define SQCDP. This acronym stands for Safety, Quality, Cost, Delivery, and People.

The idea behind a SQCDP Board is to collect and display the relevant information for all aspects of a manufacturing process in one place. The SQCDP Board can then be used by management and operations during team huddles to understand the state of the company, see any anomalies across the five categories, and manage any corrective actions.

Commonly, SQCDP Boards focus on a given period of time, such as on a monthly basis (see the example below). The top of the board has a calendar with a general status KPI color for each day, with more detailed information for each section down below.

Where Can You Use An SQCDP Board?

The SQCDP Board comes from the world of Lean Manufacturing. Much like the Andon screens you see in many facilities, it is a prominently displayed screen. It’s also similar to a plant floor dashboard which might display Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). Instead, an SQCDP Board provides data relevant to the entire business, not just production. While the specific metrics for each company may be different in each of the five areas, and we will explain some of the common ones below.

Compared to plant floor focused screens, an SQCDP Board is more often used during production meetings to keep everyone up to date with the current state of the enterprise. It allows everyone to see any relevant issues that may have popped up, corrective actions to be taken, and what is coming up on the horizon for production, people, and overall planning.

Benefits of SQCDP Boards in Manufacturing

SQCDP Boards are an excellent tool for supporting the main items discussed in our Modern Manufacturing Success post:

• Transparency

• Quality

• Adaptability

Achieve transparency by facilitating additional communication around the process and the business. Enhance quality with a deep dive into quality issues as they arise. By examining the entire company’s current state (and what is coming in the near term), your team can be ever more adaptable to changing conditions.

SQCDP Boards also provide your team with improved visibility into your operation by displaying all of the relevant information in one place. Fostering communication and transparency helps you provide increased accountability across your organization. SQCDP Boards will also help you improve employee engagement by providing insights about your business and inspiring all of your team members to reflect and share their ideas in the discussion.

Typical Information on an SQCDP Board

Determining the specific information and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to display under each heading will be unique on a case-by-case process. Below are some of the most common choices:

Safety

Safety should play an important role in any manufacturing operation. If your process is unsafe, people will get injured, leading to lost production time, regulatory fines, and potential lawsuits. Understanding and managing safety should be the top priority for your team. In the context of SQCDP, common items to track are:

• Number of safety incidents

• Injuries

• Safety violations

• Lost time due to safety incidents

Quality

Making quality products is the goal of any manufacturing operation. Even though it costs the same to produce a good part as a bad part, you can’t recoup the cost of bad parts—and the losses can go even higher with re-work. Bad quality is detrimental to a company. This is why tracking quality on an SQCDP board keeps your team up to date on any outstanding quality issues. It will also foster discussion about how to improve quality over time. Common quality metrics on an SQCDP board are:

• Number of defective parts/goods

• Customer claims on defective products

• Overall production yield

Cost

It is important for everyone in a manufacturing operation to understand the costs involved in the process. This is not necessarily a common thing for operators to take into account as it is usually hidden from view when focusing only on metrics like total production count or OEE. Common metrics to include in this section of an SQCDP board include:

• Cost of Inventory and raw materials

• Waste and Scrap Costs

• Cost Projection Deviations

• Energy and utility costs

Delivery

Delivery metrics focuse on meeting the production schedule—and ultimately meeting customer needs. This portion of the SQCDP board will help your team manage the overall supply chain from raw materials to finished goods. It will also encompass many aspects of the business from production and QA/QC to shipping and receiving. Common delivery metrics include:

• Lead time for raw materials/inventory

• On-time finished product delivery

• Order fulfillment

• Planned production time/volumes vs. actual outcomes

People

Unless you are running a fully automated, lights-out facility like an IKEA factory, odds are your people are your most valuable assets. The People portion of the SQCDP board helps your team understand labor planning, training, paid time off, and scheduling. Common metrics include:

• Overtime

• Paid time off

• Training and skills development

• Personnel changes

Digital SQCDP Boards

As a tool in the Lean Manufacturing world, SQCDP Boards tend to be implemented on a whiteboard with static information updated daily, or written out by hand. This can work well for small operations where you may only need one SQCDP Board for the entire company.

But, when you are working in a large-scale operation with multiple production areas and teams—along with automated processes and data collection—using a SCADA system such as Ignition to digitize your SQCDP Board makes a lot of sense.

Integrating SQCDP with Ignition allows you to automatically generate most of the data for your chosen metrics across the five categories. You can pull a lot of your People related information from documents or databases you are already using, and can likely get Safety information in a similar manner. Quality, Delivery, and Cost can all be collected from a combination of systems: ERP, LIMS, Scheduling, Warehouse Management, Shipping and Receiving, and from monitoring your energy usage using smart power meters.

Aggregating all of this data with Ignition also allows you to build an interactive SQCDP Board. You’ll be able to drill down into any of the data points to get more information on a particular incident, quality item, cost, or personnel record.

Digitizing SQCDP Boards can also foster asynchronous communication across multiple facilities or teams in your enterprise. All of your data is in one place, accessible by everyone, and can be linked to using tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or any other communication platforms you might use.

Wrapping Up

SQCDP Boards are a powerful tool in the manufacturing world. They provide familiar information you may know from OEE Dashboards (how much is our downtime costing us, how many quality issues do we have, and are we meeting our production goals), but they will display a broader context across your company.

OEE alone will not tell you where training is lacking, where safety issues are occurring and impacting production—or where people might be bypassing safety to speed up production.

As a general rule, OEE doesn’t directly focuse on costs, and requires jumping through additional hoops to calculate a direct impact to your bottom line.

SQCDP Boards help you answer questions about cost, efficiency, and your overall process while giving you additional context to understand what the numbers mean. We think SQCDP Boards are an underutilized tool and are excited to see more companies adopt them as they become true Modern Manufacturing Companies.

Get a Digital SQCDP Board Working For You

To learn more about SQCDP Boards and how we can help you implement them at your facility please contact us with your project requirements or schedule a meeting with Cody Johnson in sales today!